Music
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Well, that was something. A couple of years ago I read Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, a history of 20th century classical music. (I wrote about the book last year, in this post.) I recall being a bit surprised that the book opened not with that usual-for-this-subject anecdote about the 1913 premier of Stravinsky's The Rite…
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I have a soft spot, a very soft spot, for minor and neglected artists. There is a great deal of overlap in the two categories. The minor artist–meaning one who has some significant accomplishments, but smaller in number and/or scope than those of the artist acknowledged to be "great" or "major"–is often neglected. And the…
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The struggle between those who think baroque and earlier music should only be performed with period instruments and style (as best the latter can be surmised) and those who think that's faddish nonsense producing dry, thin (or worse) performances can be somewhat bitter. I don't take a definite position, as I think there's something to…
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I know I said I wasn't going to post till Monday, but I've been listening, for the first time, to Bach's St. John Passion, and this aria seems perfect for Holy Saturday, containing both the sorrow and the triumph of the Crucifixion. (Regarding the title of the post: I still prefer the traditional "It is finished"…
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I was listening to a CD which includes this work along with three of Mozart's piano sonatas. When this piece started I was confused for a bit because I thought it was Beethoven. Mozart can be surprising in that way. I had an aunt who loved classical music, and like many, especially of her generation,…
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The "Laudamus" from Mozart's Great Mass in C minor, K 427. (The "anyway" is because I've been in pretty low spirits, and listening to this Mass, especially this section, was beneficial.) This is not the performance I listened to last night, which was a 1982 performance conducted by von Karajan with Barbara Hendricks. But I…
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I heard this song a couple of days ago as one of those semi-random occurrences when I've put a CD full of MP3 files in the car player, not entirely sure what's on it. I'd forgotten how much I like it. This is by far my favorite song from the album, which is called Turn…
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There are not all that many pop albums that enchant me on first hearing. Portishead's first album, Dummy was one. It conditioned me to have an immediately positive response to any music described as trip-hop. I didn't hear this second album until some years later–this was pre-streaming and I had to buy the CD. When…
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Perhaps you would enjoy hearing about Maggie Roche's winter coat. Leave it to the Roches to record an 8-minute description of a coat (written by Maggie, according to a Facebook post I saw yesterday).
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Jack Butler, submissions editor for National Review Online, is a big fan of pop music but, is to use his own word, "embarrassingly" unacquainted with classical music. Deciding to fix that, he has taken an extremely odd measure: I have set about remedying this deficiency in classic amateur fashion: i.e., haphazardly, guided by what little…
Light On Dark Water 